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Call Bid Adjustments Are Here

By Michelle Greenberg

AdWords’ last major push for calls in AdWords was click to call ads, an ad specifically designed to drive calls for businesses. Only shown on mobile devices, clicking these ads leads you to a phone call with a sales rep. Click to call ads have worked amazingly so far. On average, the sale is 3x more likely to take place over the phone than on web for lead generation businesses. Click to call made their debut seven years ago, and now AdWords has finally made what seems to be its second major push for calls.

Call bid adjustments have been rolled out in accounts, and they have proven to be an effective tool for generating more calls for your clients. In a nutshell, these bid adjustments allow you to control how often the call option appears with your search ads. You can use these adjustments on specific campaigns in which it’s more valuable to drive a call rather than a web sale. This is especially helpful when it comes to increasing cross selling for your businesses, which is much easier to do on the phone than on the web.

Raising bid adjustments will also help call extensions appear more frequently and drive more high-value call conversions overall. Currently, extensions are a toss up in terms of how often they show up. Sitelinks, callouts and call extensions don’t have a set way to make sure they show up every time your ad appears. Instead, Google leaves it to its algorithm but you can estimate the outcome by looking at the number of impressions your extension gets and comparing that to your overall impressions for search ads. This is the first of bid adjustments to roll out for extensions, which is very exciting for marketers to say the least.

Although this is available for most accounts, it’s only accessible through the new AdWords interface. This is unquestionably an effort from Google to encourage advertisers to familiarize themselves with this recent change. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done on the back end of interface, so you may just want to use it – apply the bid adjustments – and then switch back to the regular interface for your usual day to day.

A few advertisers have been quoted saying that bid adjustments have helped them increase call volumes and lower costs. We have implemented call bid adjustments in a few of our campaigns for our lead generation clients but have yet to see results of this nature. Hopefully, we’ll have some good news to report in the coming weeks. For now, I would definitely recommend testing bid adjustments for your accounts as well!